Sunday, 26 July 2009

This post will make the most sense if you’ve seen both The Dark Knight and I’m Not There, but since loads more people have seen The Dark Knight I’ve done more of an introduction to I’m Not There. Both films are extremely detailed and multi-faceted works, and there’s a great deal more to be said on this topic than I’ve written here.

What if two films that were very dissimilar in content and context were otherwise related enough that we could think of one as a sequel to the other? More than ever before, multiplex cinemas are packed with sequels of a more traditional sort, in which most of the characters from the original film return and a similar conflict takes place in the same fictional universe. When sequels are released, such fictional universes become franchises, and franchises don’t interbreed – but could a sequel to one film come from an entirely separate franchise, in this case that of the Batman universe? Even more radically, could a film like I’m Not There, which is about the life of Bob Dylan, a real person, have a decidedly fictional sequel which takes its material from something like the illustrious Batman mythology?

Now I’m not, of course, implying that there is some shadowy circle of film producers who engineered a ‘secret sequel’ to I’m Not There – after all, The Dark Knight was already a sequel to Batman Begins in the more traditional sense. But we needn’t seriously ‘believe’ that the two are related in order to derive an interesting sort of appreciation from the comparison. In fact this is more than a simple comparison – films are similar, even weirdly so, all the time – but the many parallels between I’m Not There and The Dark Knight don’t just run surprisingly deep, the fact that they do is in itself appropriate to the themes that can be read in each film. Because taken together, these two films show us that reality and fictionalisation are not simple opposing absolutes – each film exemplifies the other in revealing an alternative way of thinking about myths and legends and how they relate to the biased stories we construct about the so-called ‘Real World’.

Right: the Dylan of ‘the Real World’, and left: a fictional Dylan in I’m Not There, played by Christian Bale.

Dramatis Personae

I’m Not There, released November 2007, directed and co-written by Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven), is to my mind easily the most interesting, perhaps the best, pick of the oddly large bunch of biopics on musical heroes that we’ve seen in the last decade. This is because I’m Not There is an anti-biopic. At the film’s opening, a caption informs us that what we’re about to watch is ‘inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan’, and throughout, the film vigorously undermines the notion that there is one single, truthful story to be told about the life of a musical legend, or that such figures even have a single coherent identity (welcome relief from the borderline pornographic myth-indulging of films like Control). Just as one Robert Zimmerman renamed himself Bob Dylan, there is, in turn, no character in I’m Not There named ‘Bob Dylan’. Instead there are six characters that resemble aspects of the real Dylan and his life, and yet each is plainly radically fictional. One Dylan is black, another is played by a woman and photographed in black and white, another stares straight into the camera from in front of a pure white backdrop, another (based on Dylan’s appearance in the similarly equivocal film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) appears to be the historical outlaw Billy the Kid and another is shown as an actor who played a Dylan-like figure in a biopic film-within-the-film. It’s difficult to imagine a film more self-aware, more richly deconstructive about the task of turning the story of a legendary figure into a film.

The six Dylans of I’m Not There. Clockwise from top left: Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, Ben Whishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, Marcus Carl Franklin as Woody Guthrie and Richard Gere as Billy the Kid. Three of these characters are also impersonating other well-known figures besides as Dylan.

Each of these six characters is a persona that both points to the ‘real’ Dylan and yet simultaneously points in a very different direction, and each comes with a different setting and cinematic language. To add to the confusion, the story of each is weaved together as the film progresses. Marcus Carl Franklin plays a poor, wayward hobo child impersonating (and only referred to as) Woody Guthrie. Ben Whishaw plays a Dylanesque character who similarly gives his name as ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ and addresses a courtroom with various poetic epigrams and mots justes, functioning as a sort of narrator for the film. Christian Bale plays Jack Rollins, resembling the early Dylan, who wrote heroic political folk songs before becoming disillusioned and ending up a born again Christian pastor. Heath Ledger plays the misogynistic Robbie Clark, an actor who portrays Jack Rollins in the film ‘Grain of Sand’ and whose defective love life and sad divorce echoes parts of Dylan’s own history. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, an exhausted, sardonic hipster who quarrels with music critics, angers his original folk fans by going electric (in a play on his name, they call him ‘Judas’) and apparently dies in a motorbike accident. In the most overtly metaphorical segments of the film, Richard Gere plays a historical Billy the Kidd living with his dog on the outskirts of the appropriately-named village of Riddle, where apocalyptic fear over the impending destruction of the village to build a highway has coincided with a Bosch-like Halloween masquerade, encouraging Billy to stand up to Pat Garrett (the lawman who ultimately killed the outlaw) at a public meeting. Of course the real Dylan, as the film’s title (referring to one of Dylan’s songs) suggests, is ‘not there’ – in fact at the start of the film the title appears on screen as the culmination of randomly appearing and disappearing words and letters: ‘I’m not he’, ‘I’m (not) her’, ‘I’m not here’, ‘I’m not there’ (a similar word game is played in The Dark Knight: the Joker’s truck has ‘laughter’ written on the side, at the start of which sprayed an ugly S has been sprayed).

Top: The film’s title appears word by word (I’m Not There), bottom: The Joker’s truck has ‘(s)laughter is the best medicene’ written on the side (The Dark Knight).

A year later, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger were back for The Dark Knight, portraying the legend of Batman’s struggle with his nemeses, the Joker and Two-Face. Since he first appeared in 1939, Batman has, like Dylan in I’m Not There, been played by many different actors, and the setting and tone of his adventures has varied wildly throughout his history, from the decidedly camp (in the sixties TV series and the feature films before Batman Begins) to the horrendously sinister (in Arkham Asylum: a Serious House on Serious Earth). Rather than Dylan, this time the position of pop culture legend protagonist is occupied by the Batman, a character who has always been not just fictional but rather blatantly fantastical, despite the increased realism of the more recent films. Just as in I’m Not There, Bale returns as the heroic do-gooder who nevertheless battles doubts and demons, while Ledger returns as the villain, the dark reflection, the opportunist, the pretender, the ‘player’ (actors and clowns are historically not so different), again, bitter about his messed-up family life. Batman also recalls the masked fantasy vigilante Billy the Kid of I’m Not There, while the Joker also echoes that film’s anarchically nihilist dandy Jude Quinn, and both these characters resonate too with the amoral, destructive sides of Batman and Dylan respectively.

Quinn and the Joker are both anarchically nihilistic, both enjoy spouting pearls of ‘wisdom’, both are powerful, influential and provocative artists who court the news and have an entourage of collaborators and both are pale-faced dandies with crazy hair. When explaining himself, Quinn says ‘I refuse to be disassociated from the evils of the world’, and ‘[Pain, remorse, love]… I have none of those feelings’, and believes that ‘traditional music… is so full of mystery and contradictions and chaos… its meaninglessness is holy’ (and as a voice-over to a Quinn segment, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ observes ‘I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me’), all of which recalls much of what the Joker says, most prominently perhaps ‘I’m an agent of chaos’. When the Joker burns an enormous pile of cash, echoing Quinn’s protesting to his manager that he doesn’t want to be a millionaire, he claims ‘it’s not about money, it’s about sending a message: everything burns’, exactly the sort of thing Quinn would say, if he were just that little bit more nihilistic. Quinn represents Dylan’s dark and troubled side, and in The Dark Knight, Quinn returns symbolically as the Joker, a monster wholly given over to evil who himself suggests the dark side of Batman (the two are repeatedly likened throughout the film, particularly when Batman’s roaring interrogation sounds ominously reminiscent of the Joker’s own).

Top: Dressed like a playful dandy, Jude Quinn teases the press (I’m Not There), bottom: the Joker’s press-release video (The Dark Knight). In the scene at the bottom, the Joker assures Gotham that he’s ‘a man of his word’ (but are we going to trust him?), in the top scene, Quinn mishears a journalist’s question and asks ‘did you say am I trying to change the word?’, and later says ‘we all have our own definitions of all those words’.

Ultimately the interconnected figures of Batman, the Joker, Two-Face, all of I’m Not There’s Dylans and Bob Dylan himself, all being mysterious players who use aliases and wear masks of sorts, together form a web of internal and mutual contradictions made up of symbolic personae.

Will the real Batman please stand up?

So The Dark Knight would be a sequel to I’m Not There on the grounds their similar character structures and themes rather than (for the most part) the particulars of content. A prominent narrative device that both films have in common is the depiction of multiple and irreconcilable manifestations or personae related to the same character. In I’m Not There, this aspect is an unconventional story-telling technique that undermines the overall coherency of the film (and by extension that of Dylan’s life) but in The Dark Knight it’s smoothly coalesced and integrated into the film’s comparatively far more coherent fictional universe in which secret identities are a defining characteristic.

Near the beginning of The Dark Knight an action sequence in a car park becomes disorientating when there appear to be multiple Batmen working as a team to fight the Scarecrow and assorted mobsters. It being the first appearance of the Batman silhouette in the film, we’re likely to believe that it’s the man himself before we’re shown that there’s more of them. Unlike the familiar Batman, these Batmen have low-grade costumes and are using machine guns. The real Batman soon shows up and battles both the hoodlums and the ‘Batmen’, until it turns out that these Batman-looking guys are copycat vigilantes, a law unto themselves. Later in the film the Joker, intent on drawing out and killing Batman, tortures and murders one of these copycat Batmen and hangs his body outside Gotham City’s mayor’s office, with a message attached: ‘Will the real Batman please stand up?’.These multiple versions of Batman, though they don’t challenge the veracity of the ‘real’ Batman, recall the multiple versions of Dylan, and I’m Not There’s viewers could well be asking ‘will the real Bob Dylan please stand up?’. In parallel with this is the apparent plurality of the Joker’s own identity. In the simplest sense, there are multiple Jokers at the start of The Dark Knight during the bank robbery – all of the Joker’s gang wear clown masks and beneath one of these masks the Joker himself is anonymously hiding, unbeknownst to his minions. But viewers will also have noticed that the Joker tells radically different, conflicting stories about his own life, or ‘how he got these scars’, throughout the film, which is starkly reminiscent of I’m Not There’s radically different biographies of Dylan. We’re likely to conclude, while the Joker explains his scars the second time around, that he’s at least partly a liar, just as we note the blatant fictionality of all I’m Not There’s Dylans. In this light the Joker’s stories can be seen as warped jokes – anti-jokes or post-jokes – because like jokes they’re ‘untrue’ little tales complete with punch-lines, though in this case traumatic and tragic (‘Why so serious?… let’s put a smile on that face’ and ‘She couldn’t stand the sight of me!… Now I see the funny side, now I’m always smiling’) rather than comic. In the Batman comics and graphic novels the Joker’s origin is similarly unclear, with various different accounts having been offered across the years. Bruce Wayne’s (he’s, uh, secretly Batman by the way) butler Alfred sums up the resistance of the Joker (and Dylan as well) to conventional biographical and psychological assessment when he suggests to Wayne, ‘perhaps this is a man that you don’t fully understand’.

(Later on, the Joker is caught using a technology that turns a cellphone into a sonar-based imaging device, and Batman assembles the phones’ multiple different viewpoints to get a complete picture of Gotham with which to locate the Joker, but ultimately this technology is destroyed for being unethical – all of which parallels the multiple viewpoints I’m Not There uses in trying and locate Dylan.)

Gotham needs a hero with a face

Indeed, the Joker is one of Batman’s most mysterious foes. In the films at least, every other Batman villain has a ‘real’ name, identity and an onscreen origin story. Even after being searched and interrogated at the police station, the Joker’s true identity remains a mystery (‘Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias’). He is nothing but an alias, a mask (Dylan played a character called ‘Alias’ in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). In fact, if the origin stories that the Joker offers in The Dark Knight and those of the comics have any grain of ‘truth’ in them, we’re led to believe that the man behind the mask is merely a down-on-his-luck average Joe with very little money or status (the opposite of Bruce Wayne) turned suddenly or slowly insane by traumatic events.

In both films the motif of masks, disguises and obscured or problematic identities is a development on the theme of plural identity. Two-face is emblematic of this – his very appearance, one side of his face stripped away and horribly disfigured, being a metaphor for multiple identities. Fantasy heroes and villains traditionally wear masks, and the costumed identity of the Scarecrow (a Batman supervillain who appeared in Batman Begins and appears briefly in The Dark Knight) is nothing but a disturbing mask made from sack-cloth, which is ripped off by Batman once he is caught to reveal a guilty grin. Another fantasy world of masks and costumes, heroes and villains, is that of Richard Gere’s Billy the Kid in I’m Not There.

Top: a child in Riddle is dressed up for an apocalyptic Halloween (I’m Not There), bottom: the Scarecrow as he appears in The Dark Knight.

This narrative thread culminates in a confrontation between Billy and Pat Garrett at a tense town meeting about the imminent destruction of Riddle. Aware that Pat Garrett is his enemy, the heroic Billy righteously questions him while wearing a partially transparent mask. Suspicious, Garrett asks Billy to remove the mask, culminating in his arrest. Later, Billy escapes from prison and hitches a ride out of town on a freight train.

Billy the Kid stands up to Pat Garrett, takes off his mask, gets arrested and ends up in a gloriously clichéd image of having been banged up (I’m Not There). See also how the Joker temporarily ends up behind bars.

This scene and its context closely mirrors a sequence in The Dark Knight – after the Joker’s murder of a copycat Batman and his videotaped ultimatum (‘You want order in Gotham? Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in’) Gotham City is gripped by panic and a press conference is called so that the real Batman can reveal himself and turn himself in. At the meeting Gotham’s District Attorney Harvey Dent attempts to calm the terrified townsfolk, and then protects the real Batman (i.e. Bruce Wayne) by claiming that he’s the Batman, and so is escorted away by the cops. Prior to this, Bruce Wayne had said of Dent ‘Harvey is that hero. He locked up half of the city's criminals, and he did it without wearing a mask. Gotham needs a hero with a face.’ Both this scene and the one in I’m Not There take place at highly charged town meetings lead by authority lawmen and attended by a crowd of panicked citizens, and end with the hero heroically unmasked and arrested by the authorities – in both cases however, under that mask is just another alias, and the plans of the authorities ultimately fail.

Harvey Dent claims that he’s the Batman, and is taken into custody (The Dark Knight).

Face-paint has the same effect as a mask of course, and the Joker’s messily daubed visage was one of the most iconic aspects of The Dark Knight’s visual design, departing as it did dramatically from the almost fussily neat foppery of previous Jokers. Amateur face-painting was also a major aspect of the visual landscape in the Billy the Kid segments of I’m Not There, as Riddle’s citizens seem to be holding some sort of absurd, apocalyptic Halloween carnival in view of the impending destruction of their town.

More Halloween costumes in Riddle (I’m Not There)

A young black man’s face is painted with something resembling the flag of the United States, while an elderly white man wearing a wig appears in blackface, both are symbolic transformations that recall the film’s black Dylan known as Woody Guthrie. Strangely, we also see two white men appearing in what I suppose must be ‘whiteface’, one of whom is Jim James from the rock band My Morning Jacket, singing Dylan’s song ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’. The other is an apparently savage young man, clutching a spear and peering at our hero Billy the Kid from deep inside the foliage around his house – not just a sinister interloper wearing white face-paint but with crude eye shadow too, this figure could be seen as an embryonic Joker biding his time, a hint of what was to come in the ‘sequel’.

Top: This young savage, watching Billy the Kidd from the bushes, could be an embryonic Joker (I’m Not There), bottom: the Joker has arrived (The Dark Knight).

The white of ‘whiteface’ could represent death or purity (ironically or otherwise), but it also says something about the perception of identity. As a white person, wearing whiteface would be a post-racist demonstration that even when the race expressed by the face-paint is one’s own, such a symbolic representation is a crude, simplistic and insufficient to describe identity – we notice the unnatural extremity of the pure white paint in contrast to the more natural skin tone of the rest of the body, and so the colour face-paint as representation of identity is deconstructed and undermined.

Top: blackface, bottom: Jim James in ‘whiteface’ (I’m Not There).

Indeed, the Joker’s shoddily applied white face-paint is all the more troubling for its hinting, in the places washed clean by sweat and violence, at the inevitable human ‘reality’ that necessarily lies beneath, of which we know nothing. This effect reaches its height when he removes the paint in order to pose as a cop, briefly appearing to us a smart, handsome (but nonetheless tragically scarred) blue-colour worker – and remaining in this instance silent, because this particular ‘real(er) life’ version of the unmasked Joker doesn’t belong to the symbolic world but wholly to the ‘real’ world. Similarly, in I’m Not There, even though he appears on concert footage playing the harmonica in the final shot of the film, the ‘real’ Dylan remains silent, as he, like the Joker, is a figure that lies beyond the reach of words, meanings and stories.

Gender, being in many cases a primary component of identity, is used to contradictory effect in both I’m Not There and The Dark Knight. Todd Haynes’s films all very much reward the reading perspective of queer theory (which argues that gender is constructed rather than inherent), what with identity, sexuality and the relationship between the two being recurring themes. Though it isn’t referred to in her/his narrative, Jude Quinn is played by a woman (Cate Blanchett, overall a very convincing Dylan) posing and dressing as a man, and in one instance wearing a moustache, that index of masculinity, that practically clichéd gesture of disguise. Conversely in The Dark Knight, the Joker (i.e. Quinn’s analogue), whose long hair and red lipstick are already rather feminine, disguises himself as a female nurse in order to infiltrate Gotham General Hospital (and for fun, perhaps).

Top: Jude Quinn, a woman dressed as a man, draws on a fake moustache (I’m Not There), bottom: the Joker as a female nurse, also with fake hair (The Dark Knight). Both are transvestites and masters/mistresses of disguise.

Other, smaller details underline the theme of cross-dressing: in I’m Not There Billy the Kid’s dog is referred to as female (‘c’mon, girl!’), even though it’s named Henry; in The Dark Knight, when Harvey Dent corners one of the Joker’s male stooges and demands to know his identity he gets no answer, discovering only the name-badge for a ‘Rachel Dawes’ (which is the name of Dent’s girlfriend, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character).

Crusader or Menace?

Near the beginning of The Dark Knight, a special news report is playing on TV entitled ‘Batman: Crusader or Menace?’. Though we’re most likely to believe that Batman is more of a crusader than a menace, the question is pertinent. In many ways Batman could be either – in the minutes before, we’d seen him attack the well-meaning copycat vigilantes and blow up several parked cars just to intimidate the bad guys. As both Batman’s polar opposite and his inverted reflection, the Joker is both a crusader and menace too, but in turn is more of a menace in a conventional reading of the film. Though he tortures, murders and terrorises, the Joker seems to want to teach the world some lessons in the process. Every one of the Dylans in I’m Not There is both a crusader and a menace – Woody Guthrie is a fugitive, escaped from juvey, who preaches a blues gospel, Arthur Rimbaud teaches wisdom in a courtroom, Jude Quinn preaches nihilism and fights the establishment but infuriates a load of people in the process, Jack Rollins writes political folk-songs but makes a nuisance of himself when accepting a civil rights award and compares himself to Lee Harvey Oswald, Robbie Clark passionately plays Jack Rollins but is nevertheless a misogynist with wandering hands and Billy the Kid heroically stands up for Riddle whilst, well, being Billy the Kid.Of all the Dylans, it’s Jude Quinn who’s the biggest menace. He throws up in the laps of his friends, stalks women, taunts his audience and is appallingly rude, and he’s hated by his former fans for going electric and turning away from political agendas and ‘truth’. Throughout Quinn’s narrative, he’s scathingly cross-examined by BBC cultural reporter Keenan Jones (played by Bruce Greenwood, who significantly also played Pat Garrett), finally causing Quinn to storm off and leading in to a surreal enactment of Dylan’s song ‘The Ballad of a Thin Man’, with its both crusading and menacing refrain ‘Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?’. The conversational styles of Quinn and the Joker are very similar – like the Joker, Quinn enjoys giving pearls of warped wisdom and often turns questions back on those who asked them to satirical effect, and this turning of the tables is illustrated metaphoriaclly during the enactment of ‘The Ballad of a Thin Man’. The song’s ‘Mr. Jones’ is thought to refer to Melody Maker critic Max Jones, but it also has a persuasive homoerotic reading (‘Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you / And then he kneels…And then he clicks his high heels / And without further notice / He asks you how it feels / And he says, “Here is your throat back / Thanks for the loan”’) and at the start of the song Jones is shown as having strayed into a cottaging situation with clones of himself, one of whom is naked (a hilarious indictment of music journalism, perhaps). For the next section, the words of the third verse are:

You hand in your ticketAnd you go watch the geekWho immediately walks up to youWhen he hears you speakAnd says, ‘How does it feelTo be such a freak?’And you say, "Impossible"As he hands you a bone

This extract from the film includes the argument between Quinn and Jones and the enactment of ‘The Ballad of a Thin Man’. As Cate Blanchett’s excellent performance was nominated for an Oscar, the Weinsten Company have very kindly put it up on YouTube in its entirety. Do watch it if you haven’t seen I’m Not There, it’s really good. Click here for it.

As this verse begins Jones enters a theatre where an audience is laughing at ‘Eeka the Geek’, a caged caveman who eats live chickens, representing Quinn. Rather than laughing too, Jones stands up and angrily protests, but at the moment he does so, the bars of the geek’s cage close around him, and Quinn is on the other side of the bars, dressed in Jones’s suit and handing him a microphone, having turned the proverbial tables. (Later on in the film, though, Quinn is unmasked by Keenan Jones: after some research, Jones finds out about Quinn’s banal, middle-class origins and real name and announces them on his television programme. Similarly, Batman is nearly unmasked on live television by Bruce Wayne’s accountant, but the Joker intevenes before this happens).

This sequence bears a striking similarity to one in The Dark Knight which begins with the similarly geekish and freakish Joker (he’s called a freak three times during the film) having been caged at the Gotham police station. After the cops scrutinise and question him, Batman interrogates the psychopath, with the Joker pointing out, ‘to [the cops], you’re just a freak, like me’. After this encounter the Joker’s left alone in the interrogation room with Detective Stevens. The Joker taunts Stevens by suggesting that because he’d killed his friends with a knife (with which one can ‘savour all the little emotions’), he knew them better than Stevens ever did, and that some of them were cowards (this reminds us of a scene in I’m Not There, where Quinn is threatened by a highly emotional knife-wielding fan who cuts a man’s face and screams ‘traitor’ at Quinn, accusing him of having ‘stabbed truth in the eye’, that organ of perception – Quinn, the master of disguise, the woman-as-a-man wearing a moustache, responds appropriately enough with ‘what’s the truth, man?’). Having been sufficiently provoked, Stevens calmly approaches the Joker to rough him up but the Joker overpowers the detective and escapes the room, using him as a hostage so as to get his phone call. When he does, the Joker rings a cellphone that he’d hidden, along with a large bomb, in the body of another prisoner, causing the bomb to explode and allowing him to escape the police station (which is what Billy the Kid had done but a lot more peacefully in I’m Not There). Just like Quinn, the Joker resisted interrogation, turned the tables, reversed the positions of captor and captured and escaped from the cage. Again, this process is a metaphor for how Dylan and the Joker confound interpretation or pigeon-holing, and how they reflect the weaknesses of their opponents in doing so.

Top: the Joker behind bars, bottom: the Joker having turned the tables on his captors (The Dark Knight)

I’m Not There ends having thoroughly complicated the issue over whether Bob Dylan is a crusader or a menace, but The Dark Knight ends with Batman, with a crusading gesture, becoming perceived as a menace in the eyes of Gotham City. Just as Harvey Dent took the fall for Batman at the press conference, so Batman in turn heroically takes the fall for Dent’s crimes as Two-face, instructing Commissioner Gordon to claim that Batman was responsible for his murders so as to keep Gotham’s morale intact. When Gordon’s son subsequently asks why the cops now have to chase Batman, he responds ‘Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.’ As opposed to Dent, who was nicknamed ‘the white knight’, the oxymoronic title ‘The Dark Knight’ demonstrates the contradictory co-existence in Batman of the crusader (knight) and the menace (dark).

You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain

Batman announces this plan for his symbolic persona to be darkened by observing: ‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things because I’m not a hero, like Dent. I killed those people. That's what I can be.’ The first sentence of this speech was a comment made by Harvey Dent over dinner earlier in the film, and its repetition makes it an emphatic slogan for The Dark Knight. Such a maxim seems highly appropriate when applied to the lives of popular music stars, who either die at the peaks of their careers and go down in history as heroic legends, or else they live on, confuse people with their later stuff, go out of fashion, make gaffs, do adverts for butter or car insurance and occasionally become the subject of criminal investigation. Though he hasn’t reached the point of fiddling with the kids (so far), this maxim is particularly suited to the career of Bob Dylan, who consistently turned away from the interests of his fans – by leaving folk behind and going electric (Bringing It All Back Home), by going country and western (Nashville Skyline), by becoming a born again Christian and singing gospel soul (Slow Train Coming), by venturing into rap and cover songs in the eighties, with the slick production and infantilism of Under the Red Sky and with the commercialism and adverts for Pepsi and Victoria’s Secret of recent years being just some of the highlights of a process that sees Dylan crusading to become a menace. This is what inspired Haynes, and what makes Dylan such a fascinating musician overall.

Bob Dylan’s Victoria’s Secret commercial, note his lack of speech and that he turns away towards the end.

I’m Not There seems to suggest that the height of Dylan’s career may have been the electric mid-sixties, the era portrayed through Jude Quinn, and that this would have been the time for Dylan to have ‘died a hero’. Like many a rockstar nearing the end, Quinn is stretched thin, exhausted, stalked by violent fans, heavily medicated and faints at one point. I’m Not There opens with a motionless Quinn on the autopsy table, having crashed his motorbike, making him the Dylan of a parallel universe in which the 1966 motorbike accident ended in death. 1966 was well before the hagiography of Sacred Martyrs in popular music became truly established, but the ‘live fast, die young’ mythology had already been exemplified by James Dean with his death in a car accident in 1955. It’s significant, then, that Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is described as having become ‘the new James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one’ after playing Jack Rollins in Grain of Sand, all actors who ‘lived fast’. You will have noticed the more than a little spooky coincidence that the remarkable actor Heath Ledger died young at the peak of his career – apparently as a result of the over-medication brought on by the stress of living rather fast, too – shortly before the The Dark Knight was released, after what is held to be his finest performance as the Joker. Like James Dean, he was an actor, and he acted as an actor in I’m Not There. Knowing about the event of Ledger’s death, tragically real though it was, has undeniably become a part of the experience of The Dark Knight, and retroactively, also I’m Not There.

Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark as Jack Rollins in I’m Not There, complaning that ‘they took away the meaning... I became a pawn in their game.’

In real life and in the world of Jude Quinn, the causal circumstances of the motorbike accident are unclear, though it appears in I’m Not There to be an accident, the event isn’t shown clearly and there’s a chance that it could have been the result of a death-wish (I am no longer talking about Heath Ledger, of course). Even if the actual plot provides no answer – and it doesn’t matter, really – we feel confident that the darker, nihilistic, amoral, hedonistic and destructive side of Quinn had a definite death-wish, as his life surely couldn’t have carried on like that. In fact one scene shows Quinn mockingly identifying with a statue of Christ on the cross. Quinn’s latent death-wish is manifest in the overt death-wish of his analogue the Joker, who deliberately risks his life by encouraging Two-face’s first 50% deadly coin toss, and later laughs maniacally as he falls towards his death. But there’s an even more significant scene in The Dark Knight that metaphorically retells the battle of Quinn with his death-wish – and it involves a motorbike crash.

After the Joker’s truck is over-turned, he crawls out of the vehicle and staggers through the streets firing his machine gun. Ahead of him, Batman is on the Batpod (his motorbike) and accelerating towards the gun-toting clown. Seeing Batman in the distance, the Joker stands his ground, playing chicken and imploring him: ‘Come on, come on, I want you to do it, hit me, come on, hit me! Hit me!’. It’s Batman who caves in, swerving to avoid the Joker at the last second, crashing the Batpod in the process and ending up lying prone on the street, at the mercy of the Joker. This sequence could be a metaphor for the conflict between the crusading and the menacing sides of Dylan’s personality, with Batman / Jack Rollins / Christian Bale pitted against the Joker / the dark side of Jude Quinn / Robbie Clark / Heath Ledger, which ends in the weak position of the constructive crusader being painfully revealed in contrast to the deconstructive menace. It could be a dream in the head of Quinn or Dylan as the motorbike speeds down the highway – it has the same relationship to I’m Not There as dreams have to waking life.

Top: Jude Quinn, having crashed his motorbike, lies in the wreckage (I’m Not There), bottom: the Batpod skids and overturns after Batman swerves to avoid the Joker (The Dark Knight).

I’m gonna head straight to Hollywood

In The Dark Knight the various Dylans and the ‘real’ one they hint at from I’m Not There coalesce into two seemingly polar opposites – Batman and the Joker – in the way that a magnet rebuilds a mess of iron filings into world of allegiance to North and South. Just like Two-face’s deadly coin, Batman and the Joker are two very different sides of the same coin, a yin-yang, an antagonistic and yet mutually reliant pair, and the Joker says as much when he tells Batman during his interrogation ‘you complete me’. Batman wouldn’t need to exist without the villainous symbolic personae that stalk Gotham’s streets of which the Joker is the deadliest and most prominent, and the Joker and other villains wouldn’t exist (as is implied in The Dark Knight and asserted in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) were it not for the presence of the powerfully influential symbolic persona of Batman, which tempts Gotham’s insane to counter with their own personae: the Joker admits, ‘I don’t wanna kill you! What would I do without you?’.

Batman and the Joker at the climax of The Dark Knight, with the Joker suggesting that they could share a cell. As they face each other for the final time (or is this only the beginning?), the Joker is, significantly, dangling upside down as he’s the inverse reflection of the Joker. This physical relationship is akin to the yin-yang symbol, the ouroboros, the two sides of coins and the mirror images on face playing cards.

Do these two films have a weird sort of ‘franchise’ connection going on? The only reason I’m calling The Dark Knight a sequel to I’m Not There is to radically expand the possibilities of what a sequel could be like in its relationship to the original film. A more particular description would see The Dark Knight as a ‘retelling’ or a ‘reading’ of I’m Not There, or conversely a transposition of I’m Not There’s philosophical lessons and narrative structures onto the Batman mythology. Unlike a traditional sequel, with The Dark Knight the original film’s elements are simplified, rather than developed and complicated as per usual. Ultimately both films appear mutually dependent in demonstrating that there is no ‘truth’ to identity, that instead there are only constructed, fragile, problematic and contradictory symbolic personae that are ultimately insufficient to describe reality and truth.

If there’s going to be a third film to make this a trilogy, it will almost certainly be Terry Gilliam’s upcoming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The Dark Knight was more fantastical than I’m Not There, and this film, to be released at the end of this year, promises to be even more fantastical again (and self-aware too), to complete the pattern. It’ll star Heath Ledger once more as a mysterious outsider who wears a mask and transforms into different legendary actors (due to Ledger’s death during filming), and Tom Waits (a singer-songwriter relatively akin to Dylan) will play the Devil (the Joker’s analogue). The parallels with I’m Not There and The Dark Knight look set to be shockingly uncanny, and I’ll be watching it with those films in mind (just for fun, though – I’ll be leaving my tinfoil hat at home). If the ‘trilogy’ were to have an overall name, it could well be ‘Will The Real Heath Ledger Please Stand Up?’.

Two photos of Ledger on the set of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Multiple costumes: one a clown’s (i.e. a player, an actor, a joker), one with a white mask, weirdly echoing I’m Not There and The Dark Knight.

Why an overtly Hollywood sequel to such an overtly un-Hollywood film? Well, what better arena to demonstrate and deconstruct the world of symbolic personae and legend narratives? And naturally the hugely successful Hollywood sequel was hinted at in I’m Not There. The young ‘Woody Guthrie’, having cheerfully performed one of his songs to the middle-class white family who are sheltering him, makes an ironically idealistic promise: ‘I’ve been writing me some songs, songs about what’s going on, and I’m gonna take these songs and I’m gonna head straight to Hollywood and make it big, just like Elvis Presley’. The response is, ‘Well Woody I wouldn’t be surprised if you did just that’.

I was recently fortunate to have had my discussion of the book Fear of Music linked to from the Twitter accounts of jlacan and (someone who is supposed to be) Slavoj Žižek (zizekspeaks). If any Lacan or Žižek readers are still browsing, or if anyone else is interested, they may have noticed a trace influence of both writers’ work in the above article, which had actually been in the pipeline for roughly a year. Though I’m drawing on areas such as psychoanalysis, semiotics, post-structuralism and queer theory, I’ve generally tried use the associated vocabularies and detail of those areas only minimally, so as encourage casual armchair perusal. That’s why this blog has been so strangely and ambiguously pitched so far – but I’m workin’ on it…

Friday, 17 July 2009

Having adorned the tops of my twoposts on wonky with portraits demonstrating the modernist approaches to form I was reading in the music, it was very interesting to see something pretty similar (above) on the cover of wonky-funk producer Débruit’s new release Let’s Post Funk. Reminiscent of dada and cubism, it could be something Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Hans Richter or Raoul Hausmann would have done if they’d had access to advanced graphics software – though they’d have abstracted the face of a bourgeois gent, and here we have a B-boy in classic streetwear striking a pose. The art and beautifully designed sleeve is by The Rainbowmonkey, who also did the video (click here) for the first track ‘I’m Goin’ Wit’ You’, in which the head on the cover is cut up and exploded into various spinning abstract shapes. Adding a contemporary, nostalgic twist to the modernist theme of finding radical new ways of representing and seeing, the art and the video can become three-dimensional if you happen to have any of those old red-blue glasses handy (incidentally, a pair can be found free in the latest issue of Dazed and Confused, which includes a similarly ‘3D’ but unrelated fashion-shoot feature on Marios Schwab – perhaps it’s in the zeitgeist, but in neither case does it seem overridingly ironic or kitsch.)

You could argue that it’s simply that the modernist look is in style, as it was in the eighties, or that it’s little more than another example of the ‘doodling’ aesthetic that has been prominent in art and design for at least a decade, but listening to the music that goes with it I feel more and more persuaded that wonky can be read as a neo-modernism or a ‘little modernism’. Sure, as a neo-modernism it’s smaller and more casual than the original project and it’s still perhaps subsumed by the wider macro-aesthetic currents and economies of postmodernism, but most interesting here is the social context of this modernist aesthetic: its home is hip hop and dance rather than orchestral ensembles or the ‘intelligent (dance, etc) music’ non/barely-scene collected by The Wire's readers, and it can’t really be dismissed as the inevitable experimental fringe either. Another thing marking this neo-modernism out is that it’s enabled to a significant extent by the personal computers and software without which the early twentieth-century modernist artists, musicians and architects could only go so far, thus it picks up where they left off. In a stimulating post on ‘wonky’ trends in architecture as they compare with the music, Jeff of the blog There Was Always Doubt makes the crucial observation:

In his book Skyscraper, Eric Howeler writes “the complexity of some recent skyscrapers reflects the increased use of the computer as a design tool. Many of the projects in this chapter would never have been built without computer-aided design and 3D-modelling software”. Although he’s talking about buildings, he might as well be talking about electronic music. Matthew Woebot Ingram points to the rise of softsynths, synthesisers that run completely on a pc or mac and which allow for total micro-control, as a key factor in wonky. By “simplifying the technicalities”, producers are afforded ample room for experimentation, just as architects are freed from the constraints of worrying if their buildings will stand up when powerful software can do that for them.

And as I’d suggested in ‘Loving Wonky’, the gorgeous subtlety of wonky’s precision unquantisation is something only truly possible in musique concrète, and even then can only be truly mastered with software that’s been available in the last decade or two.

Hans Richter’s Dada Head, 1974.

The music of Débruit (Xavier Thomas, from Paris – bout time we heard from them), not just Let’s Post Funk but his excellent previous discs Coupé Décalé and Clé De Bras too, embodies practically every characteristic of wonky I outlined in ‘Loving Wonky’, and often mixes in a glorious helping of the freshest funk besides. Funk’s bouncy, complex and melodic basslines are just so ripe for wonkification, and the bass loop of ‘I’m Goin’ Wit’ You’ has got to be one of the most jaw-dropping bass entities in recent memory, decidedly wacky yet miraculously retaining a delicious groove (you can get a basic idea of it on the video). With Sa-Ra’s Om’Mas Keith’s metrically delayed, lazy-gaited rapping over it, when this bass isn’t throwing us off utterly with mad syncopation (the first note, following a rest, is on the offbeat for gossakes) or resting for a bit with an artfully unquantised swing, it’s transformed itself into an effervescent scale rapidly running up a series of modally unexpected, slow-attack bleeps towards a dazzling chord. It’s like watching an incredible break dancing solo and suddenly seeing the dancer disobey the laws of physics or anatomy in some shockingly flagrant fashion. Like repeatedly turning themselves inside out and spinning at 100mph in mid-air for ten seconds, for example (you begin to notice the relevance of the video’s virtuoso graphical improvisation – synesthesia anyone?)

Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921.

I’m not convinced that ‘post funk’ is the most appropriate name for the music on Let’s Post Funk, if that’s what’s being suggested, as it implies some antithesis to the basic characteristics of the funk that I’m not really detecting in the music (wait, maybe Débruit is actually encouraging us to send funk through the mail, as a riposte to the rising popularity of digital mp3 downloads). Very different to Sly and the Family Stone it undoubtedly is, but it doesn’t ‘move on’ from funk in that ‘post’ kind of way, just as dubstep isn’t ‘post dub’. Something like ‘fonky’ (see what I did there), ‘hyperfunk’ (kind of vague though), ‘wonky-funk’ (as in ‘jazz-funk’) or ‘aquafunk’ (after Rustie) could be wot u might call it, if indeed u had to call it anything.

Yes, Débruit might vaguely remind you of acts like Zapp or Grandmaster Flash, but you’d be a fool to bemoan such weak resonances and dismiss it as ‘retro-necro’ pastiche. Would Zapp have written a bassline like that? Or have integrated the wonky aesthetic of unquantisation so elegantly? Wonky continues to expand our musical sensibilities.

UPDATE 07/08/09: A response to this post came from Edwin at Nothing to Be Done, seeing wonky’s (post)modernism in a different way and drawing an interesting comparison with pixelbleeding. I wrote some reactions in the comment box there. Edwin persuasively argues that wonky isn’t particularly modernist at all. A few days later I found this article by Owen Hatherley, which describes in detail some very similar ‘neo-modernisms’ in architecture under the apparently appropriate name of ‘pseudomodernism’. Both posts have challenged my own thoughts on any hypothetical ‘returns’ to modernism and while I won’t rewrite the above post, I don’t think I’ll be so eager to diagnose and wave around the word ‘modernism’ in the future.

Saturday, 4 July 2009

Unless otherwise indicated, the pictures in this post are a selection from Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the 1867 Hachette and Co. edition of Dante’s Il Purgatorio ed il Paradiso and come in the order they occur in the book. John Maus’s music can be heard here (Upset the Rhythm!), here (Myspace) and here (last fm).

In ‘Loving Wonky’ I attempted to describe the effect of ‘wonky’s’ rhythms by imagining them as a ‘thrillingly precarious balance’, a ‘tug of war between a rationalised metrical reality and a psychedelic utopia (“no place”) in which figures we recognise are subsumed expressively into a seductive abstraction’. Broadening the metaphor, we might say that ‘wonky’ is an art with one foot on the earth and one foot in heaven (or indeed one foot in hell/madness, depending on your preference and how you feel about free rhythm and pitch). In a wider context such a metaphorical understanding of the relationship between conventional figuration and abstraction arguably recognises a major path taken by audiences in recognising and appreciating great art.

In a number of ways, this earth vs utopia (or ‘real’ vs ‘unreal’) aesthetic suits the fascinating music of John Maus, whose second album, 2007’s Love is Real, I have been enjoying on constant repeat this year. Indeed, its first song is entitled ‘Heaven is Real’, and various visions of Heaven and Hell cast their long shadows across Maus’s forty-five minutes of religiously ecstatic musical pilgrimage. Love is Real is a believer’s quest to reach the quintessence of pop’s emotional expressivity – or else discover such a thing to be a starry-eyed mirage. For it’s the ambiguity of Maus’s utopia that arguably makes it so compelling, so stimulatingly lost somewhere between heaven and earth. Are we in a ‘Heaven (that) is real’, basking in the hope-giving glow of a ‘Love (that) is real’? Or do we feel the disillusionment of pop’s quixotic project, the ironic permanence of earthly banality, even a hell in which (as Tantalus, Icarus, Prometheus and the rest will tell you) the joy of transcendence is hubris, punished, impossible and forever out reach? In the end, the answer to whether or not ‘Heaven is real’ will be a matter of faith.

The greedy Tantalus suffers eternal punishment in Tartarus by having food and water always retreat from his grasp. He’s in for stealing a golden dog.

In any case, Maus certainly offers listeners a pop that draws a transcendent power from its elegant, well-crafted simplicity. His lo-fi, Romantic pop of shimmering synths undeniably brings out all the sweetness of a single chord progression, the momentum of an ostinato and the immediacy of a lyrical fragment, all entirely within the nobly ‘savage’, humanising and refreshingly personal context of home-recorded composition. Like those of his occasional collaborator and friend of over a decade Ariel Pink, and to a certain extent those of Pink’s mentor R. Stevie Moore, Maus’s songs seem on the surface to dabble in what the most mainstream of aesthetics might deem to be nostalgia, kitsch and naïveté, but it would certainly be a shame to conclude that such qualities are there for shallow thrills or cheap shots. Maus, Pink, Moore and an increasing number of like-minded musical auteurs are showing us ‘pop about pop’: a critical commentary on the mediation between personal and popular aesthetics for which the message is (in) the medium.

The metapop of Maus and Pink is constantly likened to the tunes of previous artists by music critics, a technique which doesn’t do justice to their project, and their work is invariably described as ‘nostalgic’. Notions of nostalgia, pastiche and reference have dominated writing on recent trends in musical aesthetics, frequently in a mood of frustration, and games of sound association have become particularly popular. While such games serve as an insight into new musics and contribute to an appreciation of a diverse body of musical texts, there is more to any appreciation than this, and when played exclusively or excessively these games begin to prescribe and ossify listening practices.Firstly there is this to be said about ‘nostalgia’: ‘Nostalgia’ in art is often a futurist opinion. It’s often a judgment only conceivable within an aesthetic agenda built around an imperative toward the wholly new. Any partial return to or resonance of old methods is only ‘backward-looking’ in the eyes of a doctrine that demands a progress predicated upon the constant invention of new (i.e. believed to be radically unfamiliar) methods. ‘Neo-classicism’ was/is a new cultural movement – even if some aspects were familiar, many were not, and yet this wasn’t enough for some modernists. An alternative, more finely tuned conception of progress sees the interaction of past and present in the formulation of increasingly subtle artistic results in a favourable light, as enriching and fertilising the present with the de- (and re-) familiarisation of the past(s).

Such balance between the ‘old/familiar’ and the ‘new/unfamiliar’ would of course exemplify the earth vs utopia aesthetic described above. So in many cases we might see ‘nostalgia’s’ pining for its given utopias as a fruitful aesthetic strategy, and actually this is one of the central tenets of Romantic(ist) aesthetics, as Romantic art projects heavens or hells onto ‘reality’ for emotionally resonant or fantastical effect. If romanticism does this and otherwise prioritises emotional resonance over other potential aesthetic concerns, it’s conceivably not restricted to nineteenth-century art and criticism. The term ‘post-utopian romanticism’ would describe a type of romanticism that generates emotional resonance from the loss, absence or unsustainability of a given utopia – and whether in specific cases the ‘post-’ actually applies could be unclear, a matter left to the subjectivities and philosophies of an audience. Though ‘post-utopian romanticism’ may refer to nostalgia, the term avoids the need to stretch the already vague and cumbersomely connotative definition of ‘nostalgia’ too far (would it be a personal, imaginary, political nostalgia? etc). For example, while it would be unproblematic to describe the constant, often melancholically fragmented pining of composer Charles Ives for his apparently utopian childhood and its associations as ‘nostalgia’, Peter Doig’s paintings of utopian modernist architecture expressively disappearing behind rampant foliage and distorted copies of old film stills are less easy to describe in such a way. Aspects of the (aesthetically comparable) work of both could be described as affording an aesthetic of post-utopian romanticism however.

One of Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin, 1994.

A particularly thorough and widespread contemporary manifestation of the conceivably timeless aesthetic of post-utopian romanticism has been identified by Simon Reynolds and called ‘hauntology’ in reference to a term from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. Hauntology is tied to notions of postmodernity and ‘the end of the history’ and has been much defined and discussed on the usual forums and blogs (especially k-punk’s and Splintering Bone Ashes), which I won’t go into here, but it’s on wikipedia as Derrida’s term and as a musical genre, and a great partial collection of the appropriate links appears here. Unfortunately there hasn’t yet been much, if any, connection of hauntology to currents of romanticism or visual art (where it’s arguably very well represented, more on which in future posts here) and discussion of it has for the most part been limited to the efforts of a small number of acts producing certain sorts of popular music in the UK.

Though John Maus’s style certainly can’t be reduced to pastiche, a major component of his utopian vision of Heaven is a particular resonance with eighties synth pop and film/television soundtracks in his music. It was probably inevitable that the mainstream eighties would become a focus for post-utopian/hauntological feeling: the music, film and television of the era confidently expressed a relatively pure sentimentality that we tend to deny ourselves these days but may nonetheless miss on some level. Treating this or any subject matter hauntologically (i.e. incorporating, as Maus does, certain signifiers such as lo-fi effects – tape hiss, DC offset, attenuated high frequencies, and various other ‘unprofessionalities’, or using procedures such as collage) can sanitise these sentiments by coating them in a layer of irony that manifests either textually or, ultimately, contextually. This irony can be by turns tragic, melancholic, playful, bitter, disturbing or satirical.Love is Real is much more than this however, and when it comes to the potential for irony Maus’s music is intriguingly ambiguous. Ariel Pink put it this way:

John Maus is a maniac on a bloody crusade - a tortured evangelist on a mercenary quest to rid our world of villainous defilers of The Gospel of True Love. By turns shockingly infectious and disarmingly unpredictable, his music conflates a perplexing marriage of Moroder's 'Never Ending Story' and classical 12-tone renegades of 20th century past, harking the new path which resurrects romance from its post-modern shackles, and reignites the promise of a better world.

Maus’s own words suggest a more complex relationship with what an observer might call irony, or as Pink mentions, postmodernity. In his video interview with XLR8R, Maus emphasises that he’s ‘not trying to say that there’s such a thing as sincerity or authenticity’, though he still believes in arriving at a genuine communality and that the task of music is to ‘connect’ with audiences: ‘it’s about being with each other’.

Maus’s essay and interview on R. Stevie Moore’s website reveal a great deal more about how he believes a listener might reconcile notions of irony and ‘truth’ (though he never actually uses the word ‘irony’ in connection with music). Maus, currently a political theory and philosophy instructor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, was a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas Fe, Switzerland and the sophisticated theories about his own music and that of Moore and Pink given expression in his text seem influenced by Badiou. Maus believes that Moore and Pink (as he himself also aims to) ‘proceed towards the singular truth of pop’ through the ‘excessive affirmation’ of the ‘particulars of pop’ (namely ‘standardization, materialization and multiplication’). To quote haphazardly from Maus’s methodical and meticulous essay:

R. Stevie and Ariel… exceed the standardization of pop through excessive affirmation of this particular in all of its own particulars: standardization of form, standardized emotional intention, standardization of genre, and so on. Standardization of form is the commodification of what listeners listen to in the way called music, that it will meet particular standards: song form, tonality, periodic rhythm, and so on. In the pop song ‘You Are True’, R. Stevie exceeds standardization of form though affirmation of it, i.e., this pop song is too much a pop song… This affirmation exceeds what there is. In it, the untruth of the situation becomes obvious not through negation, which commercial capitalism can always appropriate and thus even solicits, but through excessive affirmation i.e. subjective expression of what there is.…R. Stevie and Ariel exceed an untrue situational state where everyone is ‘self-evidently equal’ and therefore ‘replaceable,’ such an affirmation of subjectivity is truthful. Moreover, this affirmation is the progressive purification of pop towards its truth through the subtraction of genre.…Materialization of pop means, e.g., pop as consumable object, the pop record album’s inextricability from the materials of its production, and so on… R. Stevie and Ariel use production materials in all of their manifestations, not only those currently in fashion. As the situational state continues to ‘improve’ its means of production, i.e., through new products and planned obsolescence, the use of now obsolete materials speaks to something in excess of it. Moreover, R. Stevie and Ariel foreground the materiality of these obsolete materials.

It could be appropriate to consider this ‘excessive affirmation’ that ‘speaks to untruth’ as having an ironic, sarcastic, satirical dimension. And yet it certainly isn’t clear that Moore, Pink and Maus consider ‘the truth of pop’ in negative terms, or that their music is merely a satirical drawing back of the veil to reveal ugliness beneath. On the contrary, all three artists seem in love with ‘the truth of pop’, and each of them has shown us genuine moments of transcendent sweetness. But potentially irony needn’t necessitate a sneer. The most emphatic exploration of the nature of pop’s truth is in Maus’s (and Pink’s) music, which forces us to consider whether pop is shown to be the commodified sham of a hellish musical dystopia (through irony), or a touchingly, amusingly earthy effort – or real, true and heavenly. The liberating genius of Maus and Pink is that with their music all three of these apparently contradictory readings coexist ambiguously and inextricably. It’s this apparent contradiction in terms that points to a perfect truth about art.

Perfect Imperfection

Charles Ives, the American musical pioneer who ninety years before had a very similar artistic project to Pink and Maus, said (influenced by Emerson and transcendental philosophy) that ‘vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth’. The self-deconstructing vagueness of truth and truth of vagueness are perfected on Love is Real.It begins with the first song, ‘Heaven is Real’. Of course the statements ‘love is real’ and ‘heaven is real’ imply a rejoinder, so the fact that Maus is making them could introduce doubt about their veracity. As such these titles respond to a cultural context in which as opinions they’re denied and disbelieved – not everyone would take such statements at face value in a postmodern climate. With an almost heartbreaking sincerity, ‘Heaven is Real’ promises us that ‘you don’t have to run away from love any more’, adding ‘that’s what friends and love is for / love the world and love all man’. And yet as in a Schubert or Schumann Lied that sets a Heinrich Heine text, it’s artfully unclear whether the musical accompaniment is in agreement with these lyrics, potentially naïve (in a Romantically ironic way) as they are (note that in the XLR8R interview, Maus quotes Beckett’s(?) assertion that ‘the worst thing that ever happened to music was words’). The harmonic feel is minor, the tempo high, the voice acoustically distant and the overall mood one of anxious, fleet-footed uncertainty – are we still running from love, despite the lyrics? Or is Maus’s fatherly, Christ-like voice calling after us with wise advice, attempting to sooth us as we continue to flee? Does he succeed? Which is ‘true’, the words or the music? There are no answers or resolutions – ‘run away, (don’t run away)’.

Often in themselves, though, Maus’s usually political lyrics throughout Love is Real are perfectly poised between the genuinely persuasive and the ironically unpersuasive. In general, this balance is achieved because the lyrics for each song are typically little more than a phrase or sentence or two, a slogan. In the XLR8R interview, Maus notes that his brother calls these slogans the ‘mantras’ in his songs. One of the most memorable mantras on Love is Real is the eponymous ‘Rights for Gays’, in which the only elaboration or argument in support of this vague political slogan, which is repeated 12 times, is ‘oh yeah’. And while we’re at it, how about ‘medical care for everyone’? ‘The doctor is in’! The song is bound to amuse, and yet it cannot be denied that the phrase ‘Rights for Gays’ is a valid, powerful sentiment. I’m reluctant to accept the idea that as a university teacher of politics and philosophy, there is no self-awareness (perhaps irony, if you like) whatsoever about the simplicity of ‘Rights for Gays’ as a politically active song. So ultimately ‘Rights for Gays’ could be taken as a woefully, tragically inadequate attempt at articulating a political statement (hell), an homage to conventional, everyday politics (earth) or a heroic demand for a more utopian society (heaven). It’s all three simultaneously.

The cover of Love is Real, apparently scanned off of a mug, depicts a robot surrounded by heavenly cosmic mists and playing the sweet fiddle, though its sinister face and glowing yellow eyes make it look like something you’d see in Hell...

Another potential symbol of utopian perfection that’s introduced and then ‘imperfected’ in Maus’s work is classical counterpoint, at which he’s highly proficient. His moorestevie.com interview and his youtube playlist of favourites indicate extensive knowledge of the traditions and disciplines of this musical art, particularly as it pertains to choral music from the beginnings of polyphony through the medieval, renaissance and baroque eras to Brahms. That Maus is an expert on the (now unfortunately largely anachronistic) techniques of counterpoint makes him a Luke Skywalker-like figure, the only Jedi of his generation, born and trained in their age-old arts after their demise, the brave new hope for defeating the evil Empire. Actually there are more than a few students of counterpoint today, but there can’t be many who bring their craft directly into the field of pop like Maus does. One of the tracks on Love is Real, ‘Green Bouzard’, is a brilliantly executed traditional fugal passage in the style of Handel or Bach, whose skill at counterpoint is frequently seen as ‘perfection’. This fugue is hardly presented in the most perfect of circumstances however. The sound quality is low, it’s played on the somewhat cheesy imitation pipe organ voice of an electronic keyboard, and at the very beginning the reverb tails from some now cut previous notes still linger. In these ways the piece hints at unprofessionality, even kitsch, and yet at the same time the mastery of the fugue remains – earth, hell and heaven seem one.

This version of ‘Green Bouzard’ is slower and doesn’t have the tape hiss.

A passage of counterpoint also appears in ‘Tenebrae’ and it’s a major aspect of ‘Love Letters from Hell’ too. In the latter, Maus appropriates the musical material of the song from the Agnus Dei of the Missa La Sol Fa Re Mi by revered fifteenth- and sixteenth-century master of sacred polyphony Josquin des Prez, included on Maus’s youtube playlist. The combination of pop and a renaissance mass section is smoothly done, and the lyrics of the song work together with the liturgical text of the Agnus Dei, which is: Lamb of God, who takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us… grant us peace (Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis… dona nobis pacem). Maus’s lyrics are:

I’m feeling very sorry that it hasn’t rained all yearI’m feeling very sorry, and I’ve got the fearIt’s taking time to sort through my winding mindWhile they are tortured on my watchWe’ve got to find a wayDon’t let them fade away, babyWe’ve got to change the way‘Til there’s no one left inside this secret place.

The traditionally pop-like lyrics (‘baby’) hint at sins of omission, a subsequent guilt and the need for redemption while the text implied by the setting of Josquin’s aesthetically and religiously sacred Agnus Dei offers absolution. The combination of words that suggest a hell with heaven’s comforting, forgiving music creates a dialectical movement towards heaven. But is pop made sacred and heavenly here, or is sacred renaissance counterpoint brought down to earth/made hellish? Is the combination of the two a folly or a utopian gesture? Again, no answer to such questions is indicated, and all answers are valid.

Baroque Excess

More than one commentator has described Maus’s music as ‘baroque pop’. Although the inclusion of a Handelian fugue makes the definition rather literal in Maus’s case, the term ‘baroque pop’ has always seemed quite vague and a little misplaced. It traditionally describes the mid-sixties pop that incorporated classical instrumentation, and the fact that the most prominent of these instruments was often the harpsichord probably went some way in suggesting the epithet ‘baroque’, though the musical style is rarely akin to the classical music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Although Maus’s work often has the dramatic and Romantic qualities of sixties baroque pop, it can’t be said to have its characteristic instrumentation or formal structures.

Actually the word ‘baroque’ refers to a deformed or irregularly-shaped pearl, which already seems, with its contradictory co-existence of the traditionally ‘beautiful’ and the traditionally ‘flawed’ or ‘low quality’, a suitable metaphor for Maus’s music. The word was first applied to music in 1733 to disparagingly describe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie and was used then and subsequently as a generally pejorative term describing bizarre, extravagant, excessively aesthetic or aesthetically distasteful/unprofessional music (before it later became the name for an era in Western classical music) – again, this definition is perhaps appropriate for Maus’s work as it compares with today’s traditional aesthetics of mainstream pop, though without the negative connotations. This aesthetic of ‘excess’ was of course established in Maus’s essay to describe the songs of Moore and Pink as allowing these artists and Maus to ‘proceed towards the truth of pop’.By the standards of today’s pop mainstream, Maus’s voice alone has certain ‘bizarre, extravagant, excessively aesthetic or aesthetically distasteful/unprofessional’ qualities, both poetically and sonically. It’s often ‘too deep’ or ‘too resonant’ for the fashions of today’s mainstream pop, and the faux-English accent and the pronunciation of words like ‘baby’ and ‘town’ (in ‘Old Town’) is ‘affected’ and ‘over-stylised’ – all qualities that can be attractive in themselves of course. As poetic, Romantic utterances Maus’s songs are similarly ‘baroque’, perhaps none more so than ‘The Silent Chorus’. The text of this song alternates between and mixes together various heavens and hells, it’s both deeply Romantic (potentially to excess) and descriptive of hauntological sentiment:

This is the time for all but sunsetAnd this is the time to hang our sorrows up in cedar treesThis is the time to gather at tables aloud with memoryOf our lost play and childish pageantry

This is the time for lost abandonmentAnd this is the time for stupid whores and drunken maladyFor th’earning keep through joyless drudgery

La la la la la, (etc)

(Note that in the XLR8R interview Maus tells us that while he was writing Love is Real he was working as a cable guy!) As a backdrop for these undeniably poignant lyrics, Maus lays down one of the most sublimely beautiful soundscapes on the album – warm synths guided through monumental chord progressions are layered like clouds at sunset, guitars tingle like the strumming of angels’ harps, divine drums echo across an enormous space and minor resolves constantly into major as the pearly gates slowly open to bathe us in rays of transfiguring light.

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, 1652.

I would consider arguing, controversially perhaps, that this dimension of potential ‘excess’ and ‘imperfection’ in ‘The Silent Chorus’ illustrates a ‘truer’ or more aesthetically ‘final’ pop than those from the apparently (and unfortunately, perhaps) less self-aware tradition of comparable transfiguration songs by Romantic heroes like Scott Walker and Joy Division etc (i.e. ‘The Electrician’ etc, ‘Atmosphere’ etc, even songs like Phil Collins’s ‘Take Me Home’ etc), (the reception of Joy Division being rather spoiled by Control – a negatively ‘excessively [Romantic] aesthetic’ film if there ever was one). This transfiguration song is too much a transfiguration song. Indeed, reviewing in The Wire, Simon Hampson noted that ‘with its theatrical mid-Atlantic baritone and icy synth textures, Love is Real sometimes recalls late Joy Division, albeit with a greater self-awareness about how camp such miserabilism can be.’ By rising above inevitably changeable temporal aesthetics, rooted as they are in relativism, shifting fashions and an indecisive discourse on music for which all that was ever worthy eventually turns to kitsch or becomes negatively ‘baroque’ anyway, Maus begins to reach ‘the truth of pop’ as it’s relevant today.

One of the most memorable moments of excess on Love is Real happens at the centre of the album, in ‘Tenebrae’. By all accounts ‘Tenebrae’ is a religious observance that takes its name from the services celebrated by Catholics and some Protestants during Holy Week, hence its mantra, ‘Sing to the mystery of his blood’. The first section connotes church music and perhaps plainchant, then follows a section of classical counterpoint derived from the opening material. Suddenly a third section arrives with enormously thick, awe-inspiring chord sequences. This section is excessive in a quite literal, sonic sense because it exceeds headroom and thus becomes crackly and indistinct. Moreover, the beginning of this third section has been utterly unprepared for. Normally in a similar work by a composer such as Mahler this climactic moment would have been prepared for by a textural and dynamic crescendo at least several minutes long (and one feels sure that Maus would know this), but here it enters unannounced at full volume, right at a metrically unstressed part of the counterpoint. Such an introduction satisfies the eighteenth-century pejorative definition of ‘baroque’, but it can be seen as a masterstroke – just as religious faith is tested, it tests one’s aesthetic faith.

It could also be seen to represent the Passion with more immediacy and reality (truth) than a more aesthetically restrained style might have. There is a key part of the Tenebrae celebrations, the strepitus (‘great noise’), in which a loud noise is made by some means (book slamming etc) while the church is in complete darkness, an act which symbolises the earthquake that followed the death of Christ. The entry of Maus’s own strepitus surprises the listener in a similar fashion, and aptly portrays the awesome power of the earthquake (and the similarly awesome power of the Lord God), making a decidedly ‘great noise’ in the process. ‘Tenebrae’ is followed by the song ‘Too Much Money’, where a similar event occurs: its mantra asks ‘whatcha gonna do with all that money?, and suddenly halfway through the song there’s an almost deafening scream. This shocking, hellish moment obscures the music entirely and pushes the listener’s ‘aesthetic faith’ to the very limit – as such it recalls the biblical promise that judgment day will come ‘like a thief in the night’, and as Christ said, ‘I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’.

Pure Rockets, Sweet Armageddon

‘Too Much Money’ isn’t the only instance of Apocalypse on Love is Real. One of my favourite Maus songs on this album and in all of his work is ‘Pure Rockets’ (which can be heard on Maus’s myspace page). Its text is minimal:

Missiles in flightOh noTime to say goodbye to the skyTime to say goodbye to the trees and the oceans and the breezesMissiles are headed towards your house

The disjunction between this text and the gorgeous eventual resolutions to major harmony that are so characteristic of Love is Real (and seem to express such hope and happiness) is chilling, and chillingly liberating. Evidently this song is the two-minute warning prior to oblivion, and the lyrical message is beguilingly child-like and simple. It’s the chorus that really raises the hairs on the back of the neck: a low-pass filter is applied to the synths, making them seem distant, dreamlike, wistful and elegiac. The chords they enact are airy second inversion triads, often syncopated, as if we’re spotting contrails in the upper atmosphere or witnessing explosive impacts on the horizon. The phrase ‘missiles in flight’ is emphasised overall, the enduring image constantly reiterated in different decorative permutations and magnified by time-stretching; it’s obsessively scrutinised like the idée fixe of some trauma-induced psychosis. This Armageddon is undeniably sweet, and yet somehow this sweetness doesn’t seem inappropriate enough to allow us to dismiss it as a simple irony. ‘Pure Rockets’ makes the subject of imminent hell on earth into a heaven.So is Heaven real? That’ll depend on the faith of Maus’s listeners, like the parable of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s film Ordet, in which an apparent madman who claims he is Christ is faithlessly disbelieved by even the most zealous of religious believers on the grounds of the ‘truth’ of modern medical knowledge (read that as ‘contemporary aesthetic mores’ for Maus’s own gospel). Yet even the most icy-hearted and nihilistic listeners would find it difficult to resist being seduced on some level by the various Heavens Maus paints, whether they’re understood ironically or not. One might conclude that Heaven is as real as its image and its effect on reality, both of which can certainly be felt on Love is Real. The final truth is that there is no single way of appreciating any art, and Maus demonstrates this truth for any and every listener by artfully rendering his music as aesthetically ambiguous and yet undeniably genuine. Ultimately I don’t think it matters if Heaven is real – because somewhere between Hell, Earth and Heaven (wherever they are, real or otherwise), John Maus is finding the truth, the reality of pop.